never meet your heroes

... and never visit the scene of a book you love.

Lately: We went to Savannah over President’s Day weekend (a fact that will become abundantly clear if you keep reading). While there, we managed to escape the tourist-y downtown for almost all of our meals, venturing to the Starland neighborhood and feasting like kings. Some recommendations: Smol Bar, Late Air, Two Tides, Brochu’s. … It’s finally warming up in D.C. after the longest, coldest winter I’ve ever experienced here, and last night I fired up the grill for the first time since November. I made my most reliable main course: Molly Baz’s spicy coconut grilled chicken thighs. The creamy coconut milk plus the chili paste in the marinade work together to make this the best grilled chicken I’ve ever eaten, and the whole thing comes together in a matter of minutes.

the Mercer-Williams house

never meet your heroes

WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL, I’d obsessively peruse the books on my parents’ nightstands, desperate for the day I’d be old enough to read them too. My mom’s pile always seemed like a stack of secrets, stories I was desperate to know, to understand. I can still picture the girl’s face on the cover of “Reviving Ophelia,” her freckles and her stubborn stare. I begged to read it, until my mom told me it was sociology, for grown-ups. So instead I flipped through the endless pile of softcover mysteries, tickets to the underworld of London or Paris or New York purchased off the shelves at the grocery store in suburban St. Louis.

There was one genre I avoided, though: the Anne Rice vampire novels, with their curling fonts and illustrations of bodies contorted, fangs. I hated those books, hated the very sight of them. I lumped another book into the genre, too; the title was spooky, and on the cover was a statue of a dead-eyed bronze girl. I assumed it was horror, and I never dared open it.

Years later, when I learned the truth — that “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” is a work of (mostly) nonfiction, written by a magazine reporter, that it’s a little bit about a murder and a lot about a kooky collection of Southern misfits and artists and grown-up debutantes — well, my first reaction was despair. I’d kept myself from a good story.

Then, of course, I read it, blinking my contact lenses back into my eyes as the clock ticked past midnight. There’s no better truth than truth that reads like fiction, and I’m a sucker for stories from the recent past that make you feel like you were born right as the last good party was breaking up. Maybe they justify the number of hours — days, weeks, months — I’ve spent with my nose in books, reading instead of trying to become a character myself.

There’s no this quick plot summary can do “Midnight” justice, but here goes: There’s a young man shot dead in a historic mansion stuffed with priceless art and furniture. The antique dealer who lived there was most likely his lover, and he’s the one who pulled the trigger, who went on trial after trial. But the killing isn’t even the half of it. There’s a Yankee journalist immersing himself in the gossip and eccentricities and booze. There’s voodoo and flies buzzing around, tied with wispy strings to a man’s lapel. I read the last page and wanted to pack my bags for Savannah, if only I could by a plane ticket back to 1981.

THERE’S A PASSAGE in Joan Didion’s “The White Album” that’s often taken out of context, cut down and reframed as something inspirational, screen-printed on t-shirts and painted on oversized coffee mugs. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion wrote, and if you know anything at all about her, you might guess she would not approve of screen-printed t-shirts. Or motivation. Keep reading.

“We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five,” Didion continued. “We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

Storytelling is a coping mechanism and a method of selection, of willful blindness. We select the most workable of the multiple choices — God, do we ever. Sometimes it rains while the sun is out, and sometimes you remember the stark steel gray of the clouds. Sometimes all you can think about is the way the sunbeams pierced them like a jagged shard of glass.

Over President’s Day weekend, Jesse and I visited Savannah, and almost immediately it revealed itself as I’d imagined it would: a city of stories, weird and wild, lilting and off-center and peeling a bit at the edges. There’s a whole swath of town that’s a tourist trap now — “Midnight” turned the city into a destination — but as far as traps go, the drink specials and Paula Deen paraphernalia seem to work. Farther from the river, in brick-laid squares and underneath the Spanish moss, we might as well have been walking into John Berendt’s book, back in time. But I wanted to get even closer to the story than that. So we set off on the tail end of a thunderstorm to visit the house at the center of the book’s plot, where Jim Williams showcased his antiques and hosted his soirees and shot his lover, Danny Hansford.

THE MERCER-WILLIAMS HOUSE is an architectural marvel: pinkish-red brick, ivory columns, wrought-iron balconies, ornate details everywhere across the facade. It’s somehow both gaudy and wholly able to blend into the landscape, which seems fitting for the four walls that take credit for birthing Savannah’s tourism industry.

But here’s the thing: You can’t walk in the front door, not if you’re one of the hundreds of people who arrive daily for tours. Follow Google Maps, and you’ll be routed to the backside, through what was once the carriage house. Now, it’s a gift shop full of overpriced tchotchkes.

Tours queue up in the gift shop’s side room. Buy a quippy pack of cocktail napkins while you wait, or a cashmere sweater. Eventually, your guide will escort you through the sunken garden and onto the back porch. No photos, please and thank you. The woman leading my tour knew everything there was to know about the antiques in the house, the tile floor in the front hall, the Tiffany glass dome, the China that had spent hundreds of years shipwrecked before Williams jetted to Europe to buy up as much of it as he could.

She explained Williams’ impact on Savannah, how he’d taken it upon himself to restore dozens of grand houses that had fallen into disrepair. Without him, she suggested, the whole place might be a strip mall. And maybe it would be — what do I know? I did know that she seemed to be missing the point, examining brushstrokes and wood stains when everyone else was there for the murder. Finally, when we crossed the threshold into the blue room, the site of Hansford’s death, that she asked the group: Had everyone seen the movie? An afterthought: Had anyone read the book?

When two people failed to raise their hands, she gave a quick summary: Hansford was a troubled addict, and he tried to shoot Williams, and Williams shot him back in self defense. It took four trials for the poor man to clear his name. Now everyone, let’s file quickly across the hallway to look at a piano and a chandelier the size of a well-fed hippopotamus. My jaw hit the 157-year-old tile floor. She kept on talking about the people who commissioned the antiques, who painted the pictures, and barely at all about the butts that sat in the chairs, the eyes that admired the art.

THERE’S AN IMPORTANT CAVEAT to get out of the way: Berendt took liberties, too. Some call his book a “nonfiction novel,” which to me feels like the story my dad tells about the time he named his childhood dog, a black dachshund, Whitey. Some things exists, even when language says they should not. In Berendt’s case, he took liberties to make the story more readable, creating composite characters and inserting himself into the action a bit earlier than was strictly true. He also made concessions to the time: One of the main characters, Joe Odom, is cast as straight, with a prominent female love interest; real-life Joe was gay and died of AIDS before the book was published.

But Berendt left in the messy stuff. His story asks questions. It makes readers think about power and sexuality, the fine line between tolerating differences and accepting them — about beauty and ugliness and the blurry nature innocence and guilt. Reading it, I was transported to place teeming with characters — disparate, complicated characters — where people found unexpected ways to coexist.

There were antiques, sure, and priceless painting and the bluest bloodlines, but all of that seemed beside the point.

Until the tour. Spend a half hour in the Mercer-Williams House, and you’ll come out thinking it was Williams’s eye for art that put Savannah on the map, not Berendt’s characters and the fun they had, the struggles they faced. Visit without reading, and you might tell a story all your own: About how Williams’s long-awaited acquittal and tragic death a few months later made him the perfect tragic hero for a famous book. If I were a publisher, I’d leave that one in the slush pile.

Williams’s niece still lives on the second floor of the house, so the tour stops at the curving stairwell and avoids the kitchen. I guess she must come down at night, when the ropes are put in storage and the chandelier is lit. On the tour, I heard one woman whisper, “Why does she let all these people in her house?”

I have a guess: Upkeep must be a small fortune, and at $13 a head, the tours have to put a serious dent in the bills. They are telling a story in order to live — a smoothed-over story, filtered and flattened. In through the gift shop and back out again, and you might never even get a chance to imagine what it must’ve felt like all those years ago, to approach from the square and live whatever reality, half-forgotten, once unfolded.